Modern liberal societies often comfort themselves with a simple proposition: that neutral laws, applied equally, are sufficient to preserve liberty regardless of cultural change. Yet recent controversies surrounding speech policing in England, particularly in cases involving religious offense, suggest this confidence may be misplaced. When laws apply equally in theory but are enforced unevenly in practice, deeper questions arise. Among them is one that liberal societies are increasingly reluctant to confront: the culture of the dominant or politically influential group matters.
This is not an argument about individual moral worth. Nor is it a claim that any person, by virtue of background or belief, is inherently hostile to liberty. Rather, it is a civilizational and philosophical inquiry into whether all cultural and religious traditions are equally inclined, by their internal logic and historical development, to generate and sustain liberal norms such as freedom of conscience, equal human dignity, and toleration of offense.
Individual Dignity and Cultural Traditions
It must be stated plainly at the outset: Muslim individuals, like all individuals, possess inherent moral worth. They are capable of moral reasoning, dissent, reform, and principled commitment to liberty. Many Muslims living in liberal societies embrace free speech, pluralism, and equality before the law with sincerity and courage.
But individuals are not the same as traditions.
Religious and legal systems shape moral intuitions, social expectations, and political behavior over centuries. To examine those systems critically is not to impugn the dignity of their adherents. It is to take ideas seriously enough to evaluate their consequences.
Liberal Dignity Is Not a Universal Default
The modern liberal conception of equal human dignity is historically specific. It rests on several commitments that are neither self-evident (though perhaps they should be) nor globally universal:
- -that dignity is inherent, not conditional on belief
- -that conscience is inviolable
- -that the individual stands morally prior to the collective
- -that law exists to limit power, not enforce orthodoxy
- -that speech may be deeply offensive and still be protected
- -that apostasy and blasphemy are not crimes
These principles emerged from a distinctive Western synthesis involving Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian theology (particularly the notion of conscience and the imago Dei), medieval pluralism, Protestant dissent, and Enlightenment skepticism toward authority. They did not arise spontaneously in most other civilizational contexts.
Sharia and the Structure of Islamic Law
Historically and doctrinally, Sharia is:
- -comprehensive rather than limited, governing worship, family life, commerce, speech, and governance
- -theocentric rather than rights-based
- -status-differentiated rather than equality-based
Within classical jurisprudence:
- -Muslims and non-Muslims are not equal before the law
- -men and women are not equal before the law
- -belief is legally consequential, not private
- -apostasy is punishable
- -blasphemy is a serious offense
- -law functions to enforce moral and religious conformity
These positions are not fringe distortions. They are mainstream elements of classical fiqh and remain influential, explicitly or implicitly, in many Muslim-majority legal systems today.
This does not mean every Muslim endorses them. It does mean that the tradition itself does not naturally generate liberal norms of equal dignity and free conscience.
Conditional Dignity Versus Inherent Dignity
Islam affirms human dignity, but that dignity is conditional, tied to submission to God, correct belief, and moral conformity. Those outside the faith may be tolerated, but they are not morally or legally equivalent in the classical framework.
Liberal dignity, by contrast, insists that a person’s worth does not depend on what they believe, say, or reject. This difference is not semantic; it is foundational. It explains why liberal societies insist that offense must be tolerated, while Sharia-informed moral systems tend to view offense, especially religious offense, as a public harm requiring regulation.
History as Confirmation
History reinforces this doctrinal contrast. Across Islamic civilization, there was no sustained internal development of freedom of conscience, no durable institutional separation between religious law and state power, and no rights-based tradition limiting religious authority. Where liberal norms appear in Muslim-majority societies today, they have almost always arrived through external influence: colonial encounter, Western legal transplantation, or explicit secularization and reinterpretation.
Again, this is not a moral condemnation. It is a historical observation.
Consequences in Plural Liberal Societies
When communities shaped by non-liberal religious norms gain demographic concentration and political influence within a liberal society, tensions emerge, even if not from malice, from incompatible moral intuitions.
Liberalism depends on the willingness to tolerate offense. Traditions that treat offense to the sacred as socially destabilizing exert pressure on institutions to regulate speech rather than protect it. When the state responds by policing offense, especially unevenly, liberal neutrality collapses in practice even if it remains intact on paper.
The result is not overt authoritarianism, but something subtler: selective enforcement, chilled expression, and the quiet redefinition of liberty as freedom from offense rather than freedom of thought and speech.
To acknowledge these realities is not to reject pluralism, immigration, or the moral equality of persons. It is to recognize that liberal societies cannot survive on procedural neutrality alone. They require a shared moral commitment to the principles that sustain liberty, including the difficult principle that offense must sometimes be endured.
Pretending that all cultural traditions are equally aligned with those principles does not strengthen liberalism. It weakens it. Honest pluralism demands not silence, but clarity. About history, ideas, and the moral foundations on which free societies rest. England, indeed much of Europe has lost this clarity. And America will soon follow unless we face this issue with honesty, courage and fidelity.
If liberty matters, then culture matters as well.
And guess what? If liberty matters, then political and economic culture matters as well.
Neo-Marxism and the Secular Path to Illiberalism
The conclusions drawn above regarding religious legalism are not unique to Islam or to any particular faith tradition. The same analytical framework can be applied to certain secular ideologies, most notably contemporary leftist or neo-Marxist thought. When examined honestly, the similarities are not superficial but structural.
The relevant question remains unchanged: does a system of ideas naturally give rise to liberal norms of equal human dignity, freedom of conscience, and toleration of dissent? When that question is applied to neo-Marxist ideology, the answer is again troubling.
Inherent Dignity Replaced by Positional Worth
Classical liberalism holds that human dignity is inherent, equal, and prior to politics. Neo-Marxist thought explicitly rejects this premise. In its modern form, dignity is not intrinsic to the individual but mediated through social power structures. Moral worth is understood as contingent, shaped by race, class, gender, sexuality, or other group identities situated within an oppression hierarchy.
The individual is no longer a moral end in himself, but a representative node within a system of power relations. As a result, two individuals making identical statements may be judged entirely differently depending on their group identity. This is not equality before the law; it is status-based moral adjudication, fundamentally incompatible with liberal principles.
Group Primacy Over Individual Conscience
Just as religious legalism subordinates the individual to theological orthodoxy, neo-Marxism subordinates the individual to group identity. Moral authority flows not from universal principles but from collective positionality. Conscience becomes suspect; dissent is reframed as false consciousness, internalized oppression, or complicity.
The liberal idea that an individual may dissent in good faith, even offensively, is replaced with the presumption that disagreement itself constitutes harm.
Speech as Harm and the Return of Blasphemy Logic
A defining feature of neo-Marxist thought is the collapse of the distinction between speech and violence. Words are reconceived as “harm,” “erasure,” or “structural violence.” Once speech is categorized as harm, censorship becomes not repression but protection.
This logic mirrors religious blasphemy frameworks precisely. Where religious systems treat offense to the sacred as socially destabilizing, neo-Marxism sacralizes identity categories. Offense against these categories is treated as a moral transgression requiring intervention. The sacred object has changed; the coercive logic has not.
Orthodoxy Enforced Through Institutions
Neo-Marxism rarely begins with state coercion. Instead, it enforces conformity through social and institutional mechanisms: professional sanctions, reputational destruction, de-platforming, academic gatekeeping, and bureaucratic regulation. Law follows culture. By the time formal enforcement appears, dissent has already been morally delegitimized.
This pattern is historically familiar. Ideological systems that subordinate liberty to moral purity rarely announce themselves as authoritarian; they present themselves as corrective, therapeutic, or emancipatory.
Apostasy and Moral Excommunication
Like religious systems, neo-Marxism treats apostasy harshly. Those who leave the ideology or who fail to affirm its evolving orthodoxies are not merely mistaken but morally suspect. Neutrality becomes complicity. Silence becomes violence. Disagreement becomes hatred.
In such a framework, pluralism is impossible by definition.
Equality Redefined as Outcome
Liberal equality insists on equal treatment under neutral law. Neo-Marxism redefines equality as outcome, requiring unequal treatment to correct historical power imbalances. This necessitates differential speech rights, differential credibility, and differential legal protection.
Law ceases to function as a neutral arbiter and becomes an instrument of moral redistribution. This is not a refinement of liberalism; it is its negation.
A Convergent Threat to Liberty
The most unsettling conclusion is that religious legalism and neo-Marxist ideology converge in practice, despite their opposing metaphysical claims. Both subordinate the individual to the collective. Both sacralize certain doctrines or identities. Both treat offense as harm. Both punish dissent as moral deviance. Both instrumentalize law to enforce orthodoxy.
They are rival belief systems, not opposites.
The lesson is consistent: liberal societies cannot remain free if they treat liberty as culturally neutral or morally self-sustaining. Whether the challenge comes from religious jurisprudence or secular ideology, the erosion follows the same path: through offense-based regulation, unequal enforcement, and the abandonment of inherent human dignity.
To recognize this is not to deny injustice, suppress reform, or reject pluralism. It is to insist that liberty has moral preconditions. When those preconditions are abandoned, no matter the justification, freedom becomes procedural, conditional, and ultimately hollow, then erased entirely.
Not all ideologies are equal.
